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44 Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection
Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection 45
Patricio Guzmán
/ Chile b.1941 /
Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)
(production still) 2010 / HD Video, colour, Dolby Digital, 90 minutes, Chile, Spanish/English
(English subtitles) / Director/script: Patricio Guzmán / Cinematographer: Katell Djian / Editors: Patricio Guzmán, Emmanuelle Joly / Courtesy: the artist and Icarus Films, New York
Patr i c io Guzmán
Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)
2010
Patricio Guzmán came to prominence in the 1970s with his
urgent political documentaries that sought to shape the historical
consciousness of Latin America. He asserted ‘a country without
documentary film is like a family without a photo album’ and has
spent his career creating films that explore the transformative
modern history of Chile — from Salvador Allende’s attempts to
establish democratic socialism in the early 1970s, to the ensuing
military coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973 and a country ruled by
military junta until 1990.
Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)
2010 is an
extraordinary reading of memory and its centrality to
understanding the human condition. Set in Chile’s Atacama
Desert, the film depicts three interconnected searches into
the past: astronomers study distant stars and solar systems
located billions of years ago, archaeologists exhume and study
carefully preserved human remains and artefacts from the
desert, and a group of women search for Chile’s
desaparecidos
,
loved ones assassinated during Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year
military dictatorship, whose bodies are believed to have been
scattered in the desert.
Nostalgia for the Light
unites this desire
to connect with the past by balancing that which is personal and
defines one’s experience of the world, and the larger narrative
of how and why we remember.